Policy Issues

What does $200 million in school reform buy you? Improved English scores and no big change in math achievement. That's the bottom line offered in a working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which examined an education transformation project in Newark Public Schools.

Some state legislators were listening last year when a report from Education Northwest encouraged the use of grade point averages and school work in helping to determine how "college-ready" prospective students were.

Finally, something the current White House and its previous residents can agree on: the need to invest in STEM education. President Trump this week issued a memo to Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, encouraging her to divert $200 million from her agency's annual budget to grant programs that support "high-quality science, technology, engineering and math education."

Academic achievement is highly over-rated — at least to many Americans. The U.S. public would like to see their education dollars to go into programs that support career preparation and soft skills while giving a thumbs-down to vouchers and standardized testing.

Altogether, 74,000 schools, 2.6 million teachers and 39.2 million students now have at least the minimum connectivity to access digital learning, while 1,587 rural schools still lack adequate infrastructure to meet the requirements.

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Ransomware and malware attacks have been capturing recent headlines. Local governments and organizations in Scotland, the United States, and Japan have reportedly been targeted, with at least one case resulting in a very public, high profile outage. These attacks are now reported to have spread across both public and private sector industries.
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